Episode 30 - Lee McGowan and the Matildas; remembering Pim Verbeek; ball boys

Download and listen to episode 30 here.

On this week's episode, fill-in co-host for Ian Syson, Tony Persoglia, is sick, so we've co-opted Lee McGowan - who was in the studio to talk about his book anyway - for the whole hour.

We begin as we usually do, by noting the progress of the Mark Boric Express, which this week saw Mark meet up with Greg Stock somewhere in the middle of the regional Victoria to make an exchange. Check out Mark's Twitter feed for news of his updates, or head straight to the where all the goodness ends up.

The former Socceroos coach Pim Verbeek died last week, and we have a segment which covers the somewhat perplexing (to Paul, and a few others) reaction to Verbeek's passing - someone who was arguably largely unloved across the board during his time as Socceroos coach from 2007-2010. Yet as news of his passing came to light last week, there was a respect shown online for Pim that seemed to surpass mere sincere condolences for his family and friends. We look back at how Pim came to be Socceroos coach (including a diversion into the man he beat for the job, one time coaching wunderkind Philippe Troussier); his blunt, honest manner on the quality of the players at his disposal, and the quality of the A-League; the still mystery laden disaster of the Socceroos' opening game of the 2010 World Cup, and the reaction to that at the time; and the ways in which perhaps those in the media and football administration got to see a different side of Pim than what the public did.

(see also Bonita Mersiades' piece remembering Pim Verbeek)

We also noted that a new sports museum has opened in the small town of Rochester (about 180kms north of Melbourne), specialising in sports apparel from the 4,000 item strong collection of John Forbes (not the poet), who worked at Puma for 24 years. The museum probably specialises in cricket and AFL merch, but it's not known what soccer material the museum has in its collection - so if that was the main purpose of your visit, it'd probably be best to call the museum in advance. The museum is open on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 10am to 4pm, and at other times by appointment. The museum doesn't have a website, but it does have a Facebook page.

In 100 Years Ago Today we look at the big announcement that the English are investigating the possibility of sending a team to Australia and New Zealand in 1921 - provided the 'dominions' can stump up the cash; more soccer folk playing cricket in the summer, this time in inner-Melbourne; some confusing same-day articles in the Wollongong press, which seem to contradict and/or supersede each other; and the brief story of one K. McCredle, a Sydney schoolboy who was a talented cricketer, and before that a talented soccer player - before his school, Sydney Boys High, discontinued its soccer program.

(see also this 2009 piece by Spiro Zavos on The Roar about the decline of rugby at Sydney Boys High, partly replaced as a sport of choice by soccer, but also due to, *cough* demographic changes *cough*)

After that extended opening, we chat to Lee McGowan about his and Fiona Crawford's new book Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women's Football (published by NewSouth), a discussion  which covers, among other things:

• The early days of women's soccer in Australia, especially in Queensland.
• The difficulties involved with researching women's sport in Australia.
• Buried histories, broken continuities, and the predominance of relying on oral histories.
• The difficulties faced by women's soccer in this country -covering funding, infrastructure, wages, injuries, but most of all, a deficit of respect.
• The difficulty and necessity of building a culture which can withstand innumerable setbacks and overcomes many obstacles, while somehow leaving a legacy for the following generations.
• The need to avoid imitating male sporting cultures, all while acknowledging the positive effect many men have had on the Matildas and women's soccer - but also emphasising the need to develop and promote female coaches. referees and administrators
• And of course, the development of the Matildas from obscurity in the 1970s to mainstream, well-loved brand in the 2010s.

The episode also makes the occasional detours into football literature, ball boys, and Terry Venables.

Episode 11 - Tony Persoglia & OzFootball

Download and listen to episode 11.

We begin this episode arguing or not arguing about whether there was any tension on the show the previous week.

Then a nod to the nascent scanning and uploading collaboration between Greg Stock and Mark Boric, which initially at least beefed up the NSW related contents on Mark's blog.

We segue into a discussion on the eminent football historian Tony Collins, and a particular episode of his own Rugby Reloaded podcast series (don't let the name fool you - the series contains material on a wider variety of football codes), which discusses the problems of trying to claim "historic firsts". 

Ian moves on to talking about his love-affair with Queensland soccer historian Garry McKenzie, and a piece written by sports writer John Harms about soccer in Goombungee.

Then the birth of the 100 Years Ago Today sting. Oh, and the relevant segment continues as normal, including having to read the paper to find out which train to take in Perth to get to a game.

Aussie soccer stats nerd Tony Persoglia could talk the leg off a chair
 - which is fine by us if he's talking about Australian soccer history.

We then interview Tony Persoglia, a statistician and historian who's mostly based around OzFootball. Tony has worked on OzFootball for a long time, and he takes us through the process of OzFootball's earliest days, the technical obstacles, and the nature of the gradually mainstreaming of the internet. 

Tony has also been working on a revamped version of the Victorian club database, a revamped version of Victorian league results and tables, Victorian players, and a new project detailing every player - men and women - who have played a topflight game in Australian. 

The discussion also covers the logistical and ideological issues with collecting stats and recording history in Australian soccer, especially with regards to the paucity of federation help at either state or national level - and the difficulty of sourcing women's national league stats. We also pay credit to John Punshon, one of Australian soccer history's most unsung heroes.

We finish off the show with a quick chat about Ian's "First Kicks" project.

Episode 10 - Greg Downes and international women's soccer; Melbourne Victory and Footscray Park

Download and listen to episode 10 here.

We begin the show by discussing Aussie rules historian Rhett Bartlett's personal funding of the scanning of The Richmond Guardian newspaper on Trove, and the practical and ideological possibilities - good and bad - of historians self-funding of work which would ordinarily be left to governments.

Then we get rapped on the knuckles - justifiably - by our New South Wales listeners, for our ignorance of who the writer "Celtic" was. Paul chooses to lay the blame

Then 100 Years Ago Today, where the soon to be famous segment sting begins to emerge from the primordial ooze, and where we travel to Toowoomba, Woonona, Thirroul, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Jervis Bay. And hipster soccer balls!

Then we chat to Greg Downes about women's international football, in the lead-up to the women's World Cup, and the increasing popularity of women's soccer both at home and abroad. Greg delves into:

• the origins of Australia's participation in international women's soccer 
• another missing trophy
• how the teams funded their overseas trips
• the messy way that international diplomacy sometimes got in the way of overseas participation 
• the restrictions placed on women's soccer by male governing bodies
• the logistical obstacles for players to make their way into the national team - fundraising, remoteness from NSW and Queensland's dominance of women's soccer.

And then Greg makes a guess as to who will win the tournament... did he get it right?

Then Ian tries to resuscitate his Sacred Sites segment by calling it Grounds For Discontent. The segment focuses on social media interactions regarding Footscray Park and Melbourne Victory. Is it an issue that's a bit too contemporary for a history show? Can you be ambivalently antagonistic? I mean Ian does manage to eventually get into the history of Footscray Park and soccer. Oh, the persistent problem of grounds - we trawl across the issue across states! And how should (and are) private and public sporting clubs treated differently, and what are the historical resonances between historic disputes over professional sporting clubs vs (nominally) amateur ones?

We finish the show by looking very briefly at the issue of triangulation - reading beyond one kind source, and corroborating trends and facts by looking at a wider variety of material. This is prompted by Paul's reading of a book on the Glebe Rugby League Football Club, which almost entirely omits the existence of soccer in Sydney to puzzling ends, though perhaps not as much as the Melbourne historian Marc Fiddian's near complete overlooking of soccer in history on the Brunswick Street Oval.

Episode 6 - Walter Pless; school soccer; State Federation histories

Tasmanian soccer journalist and historian
Walter Pless had a chat with us.

Download and listen to episode 6.

On our final episode for the year, we began the show with some feedback courtesy of Athas Zafiris, who had a justified bone to pick with us about our discussion on the 'digital narrowness' discussion during the previous week's episode.

In the '100 Years Ago Today' segment, Ian discusses school soccer.

We also chatted with Tasmanian soccer journalist Walter Pless. During the interview we covered Walter's personal soccer journey, his decades of soccer journalism, his shift into blogging and historical writing, and measuring the playing dimension's of Hobart's soccer grounds (link is archived from the original).

Then Paul discussed the various state federation's historical offerings, of which South Australia's Hall of Fame and especially Western Australia's broad sweep of history are the clear leaders of an otherwise bad bunch.

We also thanks a whole bunch of people for their support over our six-week pilot period.

Episode 4 - Les Street; Falcons Park; John Jaap; Woogaroo

Download and listen to episode 4 here.

We begin with a bit of housekeeping, including book launches, and some feedback to the soccer in schools discussion from the previous week. There's also some feedback from Mark Boric on our Prahran segment from the week before. There's also some feedback on Paul Nicholls on an old trophy, and Twitter's @jgrb on being surprised that Paul's voice was more manic than lugubrious.

After the break, Ian asks the question what was the first game of soccer in Australia, with Paul looking for a scapegoat for the NSW centrism inherent in the assumed answer of Parramatta 1880. Ian then gets into one of his favourite topics, the 1875 game of soccer at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum under the guidance of John Jaap, the Asylum's director. The discussion expands into the idea of the "motivating individual" who establishes and promotes soccer in a region or community, and without whose contributions the initial urge to play soccer may either not occur, or merely become a spark that fails to ignite.

(For the Bertolt Brecht poem, see 'Questions From a Worker Who Reads'. For earlier articles by Ian on the Woogaroo game, see this and this).

The discussion moves on to two 1879 games of soccer in Tasmania and the influence Captain Edmond Meyer Tudor-Boddam, an intimidating personality who attempted to push the cause of soccer against competing options. We come to the conclusion that the importance of Parramatta 1880 is its role as the beginning of organised competitive or continuous soccer, something that a tradition can traced be back to.

Les Street spoke to us about one time national league ground Falcons Park.

We then cross to Les Street parked on the side of the road somewhere near Kongwak in South Gippsland. Les is Australia's leading expert on Australian soccer stadiums, with a particular interest in documenting the grounds used in Australian top-flight soccer. We mix a discussion of Falcons Park, the Morwell Falcons' ground, as well as including some gunzel chat.

We discuss Morwell, Gippsland in terms of economic terms, and the unusual factor that despite being a coal mining region, soccer doesn't seem to exist in the same way that it does in other coal mining areas like Newcastle. We also discuss Paul and Ian's guided tour of Morwell with Don Di Fabrizio from back in 2009. For those wondering about the fate of the Eastern Pride sign that Les mentions:

Was removed about five minutes after we were expelled from the NSL.

If only the council was so quick to help the club as it was to remove anything Falcons-related as part of an insane vendetta to wipe the sport out of the region in the early 2000s. They almost succeeded.

— Sebastian Hassett (@sebth) October 23, 2019

We move on to the complicated story of how Morwell actually got into the NSL, and the complicated, contrived, and comical nature of promotion and relegation in the National Soccer League at the time. We finally get into a discussion of Falcons Park - and Paul gets to do his stand up routine gag about Italian weddings in Morwell.

We wrap up the episode by foreshadowing a discussion on Trove, the National Library of Australia's archive of online and digital resources, including its magnificent newspaper database.

Episode 3 - Missing trophies; Soccer in schools; Prahran

Download and listen to episode 3 here.

We begin with trying to figure out the current monetary value of the FA Trophy, donated to Australian soccer back in the day for interstate competition (and currently in the possession of Football Victoria). Back then it was valued at £250, a year's annual salary for a working man. As to the value of £250 in today's money, we got two estimates, one being  $40,000 (David Krunic) and the other estimate being as much as 60,000 (Andrew Howe).

Soccer historian and listener of the show, Peter Eedy, took the theme of missing trophies and ran with it, discussing a range of Queensland trophies. There was

• the 1961 Australia Charity Cup won by the now defunct Hellenic club of Brisbane
• The Hilton Shield played for from the 1920-1960s - also missing
• Late 1800s badges. 
• The Brisbane Charity Cup

We also noted Simon Smale's article about Brisbane City's missing NSL Cup trophy.

This week's main discussion focuses on soccer in schools, especially in the early 1900s. Moving across the different states, we look at how the growth in school soccer, and the responses it engendered from rival codes of football, is key to understanding the development not just of soccer, but also other football codes, and the rhetoric used against soccer in Australia to this day. Among the examples looked at are:

• Kogarah High School in Sydney, a new soccer area with a sudden growth of clubs
• Sydney's Marist Brothers high school, with a six teams in an internal competition; unusual in that it was a Catholic led soccer culture
• Perth, possibly the ground zero of a virulent strain of anti-soccer rhetoric which classed soccer an invader and a threat, and which set the ground for a code-wars view of soccer by Australian rules bodies, as opposed to one where soccer was seen a harmless novelty 
• Melbourne, where school soccer had the difficult task of trying to dislodge the already established take-up of Australian rules

Moving on from historic representations of school soccer to literary ones, we look at the the play and film versions of The Heartbreak Kid, and the centrality in both of teachers as ; we also look at the centrality in soccer literature of teachers as gatekeepers (for better and worse) for soccer; we also compare the effects that such 'motivating individuals' have on a local soccer culture in terms of creating a sense of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. These concepts are linked

(see also this from Paul's blog on the The Heartbreak Kid film and its connections to South Melbourne Hellas.)

We move on to a Sacred Sites segment, looking at the inner-Melbourne suburb of Prahran. Apart from featuring as a key soccer locality in Melbourne from the game's earliest days through until the late 1940s (and maintaining a club presence until the late 1980s), there are also these connections to school soccer. Prahran High School was the site of filming for The Heartbreak Kid; Ange Postecoglou was a student at Prahran High School, and where he set up teams in the absence of formal support; just a few years later Prahran High School (with future NSL player Ange Goutzioulis) were state champions.